One, three, seven that’s how counting goes for Zensar’s insurance portfolio. After freezing two deals worth $1 million and $3 million recently, Zensar Technologies has now entered a $7 million outsourcing deal with a large South African insurance player. With this deal, four out of five large banking and insurance players in South Africa become Zensar’s clients.
“While we continue our work in the financial services industry, the focus is now on investment banking and insurance,” says Ganesh Natarajan, CEO, Zensar. Of the past six years that Zensar has been operational in South Africa, they have lasting client relationships with Investec Bank in both South Africa and the U.K., as also with Nedbank (Nedcore earlier).
Zensar, a $ 135 million company, offers a complete range of outsourced services like document management and application development to Investec. On the other hand, it is the process consulting work that they do for Nedbank. This will be a “total outsourcing” deal that will comprise application portfolio analysis through consultancy and based on the analysis, Zensar will then offer application development, maintenance testing and BPO solutions.
Zensar’s South African deal has come barely a week after Satyam Computer Services divulged its plans to set up IT and BPO operations in South Africa in government, oil, banking and telecom domains. Unisys Africa — a subsidiary of U.S. listed technology group Unisys — has made public their intent of opening a business process outsourcing (BPO) center in S.A.
The earlier $3 million deal with a mid-tier Mid West U.S. provider of insurance products, entails migration of their core claims processing and insurance solution to one based on Java using Zensar’s three-stage migration solution called Blueprint. While Zensar’s teams are already studying and working on the customer requirements, the company plans to ramp up to a total of 250 workers over the next four months who will work for these two projects. The company also signed a $1 million BPO contract with another Latin American client in the insurance space.
A recent study by the Everest Research Institute claims that insurance is an upcoming area in outsourcing. According to the research, even India is now emerging as a buyer of insurance services.
Zensar has been actively ramping up its presence across the globe right through the beginning of this year. Recently it acquired 100 percent stakes in ThoughtDigital (a New York-based IT company) and OBT (a SAP consulting firm, now known as Zensar OBT Global), and owns 60 percent stake in a Japanese software firm EZA Technologies (now known as Zensar Advanced Technologies).
The company is open to alliances and acquisitions in the financial services domain. “We are looking for tactical acquisitions, aimed at increasing our geographical reach, in Germany and Switzerland over the next six months,” says Natarajan.
Europe has been a hot ground for quite some time now with a lot of outsourcing deals being signed there. A recent study by Equaterra suggests that the demand of outsourcing increased by 50 percent in EMEA from April 2007 to June 2007 as against the global growth of 37 percent. The study indicates that the public sector in Europe has a huge scope for consuming outsourced services. Companies like CSC, AlmavivA group and Verizon have already shown action by grabbing outsourcing deals as large as $20 billion in the months gone by, with government departments.
